Oh, how America has changed. In just a little over two months, the Trump administration has turned the entire social services network on its head and left a lot of people scrambling for answers. But one thing Trump did make clear during his campaign: He was going to take a much harder line approach to homelessness in the hopes of restoring order to cities that have been overwhelmed by thousands living in tents on the street struggling with fentanyl and methamphetamine addiction or severe untreated mental illness.
In states like California, where Housing First became the law of the land in 2016 (SB 1380), homelessness increased in the state by 40 percent. This is not to suggest that Housing First and Harm Reduction cause homelessness; instead, the policies that were supposed to reduce homelessness failed even with a funding stream of $24 billion from the state failed at its stated goal: reducing homelessness. You can argue and point to all the other reasons for this: lack of housing, early childhood trauma, generational addiction, and so forth. But that doesn’t change the facts. Several thousand nonprofit organizations in California, along with several city and county departments of homelessness, were given the reins and failed. They failed in their ideology, failed in their implementation, and failed in their data reporting.
What is Housing First anyway?
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness:
Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life. This approach is guided by the belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues. Additionally, Housing First is based on the understanding that client choice is valuable in housing selection and supportive service participation and that exercising that choice is likely to make a client more successful in remaining housed and improving their life.
The crisis in a nutshell is deprioritizing drug addiction.
Notice that “substance use issues” are listed as “less critical.” That is the crisis in a nutshell: deprioritizing drug addiction. Why? Because it’s not 2006 anymore. It’s 2025 and we have fentanyl and P2P methamphetamine ravaging our country and the homeless population — even by conservative estimates, 47 percent of the homeless struggle with addiction. We all know it’s way more than that in inner cities.
Change is here — like it or not
Enter President Trump, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump is a teetotaler and doesn’t drink. Turner ran a faith-based organization that helps people out of poverty, and Kennedy is in recovery. This trifecta of leadership not only believes in the power of transformation but generally believes that intervention is necessary for those living unsheltered on the streets who are carrying an addiction or mental illness around with them. I agree. As a formerly homeless drug user, if it were not for the intervention I got from the police, I’d be dead, like so many others. In 2018, when I was homeless, fentanyl was just hitting the streets. I was already transitioning to it until I got arrested for what turned out to be the last time. What Trump is proposing is a “treatment first” agenda, where people are removed from the street and placed in shelters or transitional housing or shelter on government-owned land and given services to address their needs in the hopes that some will return to society.
A lot of people think this is cruel. But consider this: I was sitting in jail and was presented with two choices: One, Stay in jail until they release me back into homelessness. Two, Go into a six-month residential treatment program. Why is that cruel? I’m alive and nearly seven years sober because of it. What’s more cruel is leaving people on the street, or I would argue, putting them into a run-down hotel or motel alone with their drugs. That’s not housing. That’s cruelty.
Change is coming. Recovery is coming. The fight will be fierce. Organizations that have raked in millions to provide “homeless services” that can’t even provide data on outcomes will lose their grants. Ideologies will be threatened as Housing First and Harm Reduction are part of the “social justice” framework. But hey, you failed at the job you promised to do: Reduce homelessness. It’s time to have new people with new ideas. Because honestly, we’ve been sitting on rock bottom for a while.